Are you serious? Before health codes and competent companies the quality of food was shockingly bad all over the place, and there are still so many issues. People think covid is bad have very little idea how dangerous basic life used to be, and in no small way was this caused in part by food safety.

It really wasn't that bad, but people were way more self-reliant.

Uh..Look up food quality in antiquity.

Food born illnesses (e.coli, salmonella, norovirus) have ravaged societies for hundreds of years.

only very recently in the west have we been able to say "this food sucks" because of our opinion of the taste, look. It used to be "I will eat this food that sucks" because even though it tasted sour that's all there was.

Yeah? I still fucking eat moldy and off tasting food because I had little when I was young.

I balk at people throwing bread in the trash, that was near sacrilegious lol.

Anyway, people lived. There was struggle, yes. Perhaps it was better than the meaningless waste of life millions have today.

If our two gut biomes where examined by the same gastroenterologist, they might say mine is more bacterially mono-cultured and yours is more cultured. Who's to say that's bad?

An experiment that isn't reasonable: Go to a Gastroenterologist, tell them you regularly or have no issue eating molded food/expired, and see if you carry the same heath insurance provider within a week.

You would balk at the realization that those eating habits you mentioned aren't thought of as "healthy" by those analyzing healthy eating habits and adjusting insurance rates off of it.

All of human history has been much more dangerous in general than the current time, and dangerous food has always been one of the risks, at levels we would currently find shocking and unacceptable. The tradeoff is that starvation and malnutrition have also been serious concerns for all of human history, too. Your grocery store, full of safe and abundant food, is the historical exception, not the norm.

For example, as recently as a century or two ago, milk routinely killed people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness

The problems the UK dealt with in the 1800s sound horrifying. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulterat...

And adulturated food in general was a serious problem in the US, in times still within living memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regula...

In some ways, it still is. A lot of people advocate avoiding processed food entirely, as a way to dodge these sorts of bullets.

You know the original meaning of the word "sophisticated"?

You know the "slug in the bottle" case?

Historically, people were not well protected, and traders took advantage of this. We survived because we're tough enough to ride out most food poisoning, but some childhood mortality probably comes down to this, as would some other shorter lifespan on the tables of mortality.

So yes, for most of human history we didn't have either corporations or laws about food hygiene. Except I think you'll find some of the earliest laws are in fact, about food hygene: market regulation was about markets in the literal, tables of goods in the square sense. The right to run a market came with the requirement to run it properly for the common good. Burghers prohibited butchers from dumping waste meat.

I think our wires have been crossed. My issue isn't that food safety hasn't been an issue for humanity, it is the idea that corporations are the party that have lead the charge for stricter food safery standards (other than CYA) and that we should defer to them.

If the FDA wants to audit kytch to ensure their software and hardware is compliant, by all means. I am however not going to trust mcdonalds or taylor to do that.

Corporations didn’t lead the charge but they have a higher chance of better compliance because of their size and age. There are of course superb independent restaurants but there are also terrible ones, a corporate parent provides a decent signal that a minimum of safety policies will be followed. A finicky machine that breaks all the time because exact procedure isn’t followed sucks for uptime but is great for safety. Preferably the ergonomics of the thing would be redesigned for robustness but it seems incentives aren’t aligned properly.

What are you talking about corporations leading the charge? They couldn't care less until the publication of "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. He talked about how they would do whatever was necessary to make spoiled food saleable. If that meant adding talc or bleaching it then so be it. If that meant turning hot dogs into the most amazing use of waste they would.

In fact I would argue it is against corporations best interest in ancient time to ensure food safety, because it would increase waste

I think you might be reading a sarcastic comment as if it's serious.

I think what happened is that “My issue” was read incorrectly to mean “my point is” when it really means “my problem with”

Well for me it's not about safety, but quality. I know my drink isn't going to taste funny or my food taste off. Part of that is stringent and high quality repair and calibration.

There's a reason I go to McDonald's more than, say, burger King, KFC, or wendy's for my junk food fix.

That isn't mcdonald's or taylor's argument though, they are spinning this as safety issue to scare people into believing someone sorting out their horrible engineering is going to lead to food borne illness.

With 420,000 deaths per year?

https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-food...

Non snarky: survival probability was a lot lower for most of human history.